Jeff Otto O’Brien

“Photography is often seen as an individual endeavor concerned with the documentation of external ephemera and objects. Taking a photograph, as it were, is an intensional act for the photograph is of something- the photographic subject. This commonly held view of photography, which often goes hand-in-hand with the notion that “the camera never lies”, ought to be challenged for it is a reductivist view that demarcates photography from other art forms and relegates it to somewhat of a technical phenomenon.

My current series, titled “revaluation”, is about revaluating photography. I am interested in examining the prescribed limits of photography and whether or not it need be an intensional act. The photographs presented here have been edited in two separate, non-traditional manners: the first being a pixelisation of the digital image that examines the minimum data required to represent a subject, the second being a slight editing of the data behind the photograph that radically alters the image to a point where it is unrecognizable and non-representational.” Jeff Otto O’Brien